


By Any Other Name

by embolalia



Category: Battlestar Galactica (2003)
Genre: Aftermath of nuclear attacks, Battlestar Galactica Mini-Series, F/M, Is Cylon death exactly character death?, Two years and he never learned her name...
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-03-23
Updated: 2014-03-23
Packaged: 2018-01-16 18:34:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,126
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1357678
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/embolalia/pseuds/embolalia
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Gaius finds himself alive at the end of the world, alone with the body of his lover.</p>
            </blockquote>





	By Any Other Name

The shockwave shakes the house for what feels like forever before finally rumbling into silence. Something sharp is digging into his ribs and his heart is racing like it’ll never settle, but slowly Gaius catches his breath. “Are you alright, darling?” he whispers. She’s saved his life and just when it turns out not to be worth anything at all.

He turns his head and something damp brushes his face. Gaius pulls back quickly, squinting in the dim light; dust fills the air and debris is blocking where the window used to be. Later he thinks maybe he saw right away and just didn’t want to: it’s her hair. Her hair, soaked with blood that he’s fairly certain isn’t his. Gaius eases gently out from under her, laying her down beside him, holding her head up with his arm so it doesn’t rest on the fragments of glass.

“Are you alright?” he asks again, pleading, tears already forming in his eyes as he presses his other hand to the gash in her side. She isn’t going to answer.

After long minutes he lets go of her, both hands covered in blood. He sits beside her for a long time, sobbing into the silence.

  
*

  
She’s started to grow cold when Gaius realizes he needs to move her before her body is too stiff. Rising to his feet, every bruise and cut making itself known, he heads gingerly up the stairs to the bedroom. They don’t collapse.

There are clean sheets in the linen closet - _sheets she chose_ \- and he takes out one of the white silk set. He climbs back down to her and arranges her limbs, rolls her into the sheet.

Staggering, crying, Gaius carries her out the door and down the path to the lake. As long as he doesn’t turn around, the world hasn’t changed much. Stumbling to his knees, Gaius lays her on the narrow strip of beach.

The first time they had sex here, she made him a picnic, and she curled up next to him with her head on his leg. He stroked her hair absentmindedly. She turned when he did it, looked up at him with total surprise and he seemed to see her beauty for the first time. Such a simple thing.

For a moment now, he pulls the sheet back to stroke her hair. Then he covers her face again, her hair, too. Even if everything she said is real, and she’s really somewhere else now, he can’t stand the sight of her dead eyes.

She asked him, a million years ago, a day ago, if he loved her. He never answered. He’s fairly sure she’s the only person who’s ever loved him.

Off in the distance across the lake, another bomb goes off. It’s far enough away that the wall of sound and vibration comes several seconds after the burst of light. The force sends waves through the lake, but not quite high enough to reach them. Already dark clouds are staining the sky. It can’t be real. It can’t be happening because of him, because of them. He quite literally can’t imagine it; his personal tragedy in this moment is greater than that of the human race, and at any rate, it’s his.

Another bomb, and another, at greater distance. Gaius looks down at the dark sand beneath him. He could lay down right here and die. It’s coming for him, in minutes or hours. The whole charade is finally about to be over. No one ever found out who he was. Except her.

With a half-sob, he springs to his feet. There’s one last thing to do. He heads back up the path to the house and climbs over the debris, throwing broken chairs and torn paintings aside in his search.

There it is: her briefcase. He throws it open and dumps it out, searching wildly for a letter, a business card - anything that will tell him after all this time. After all this pretending and joking and telling himself it was only a game that he didn’t know.

It turns up not in her case, or written inside one of her books or on the back of a photograph but right there on a postcard she put up in the kitchen, something a cousin sent her: a picture of the beach with glowing white sands. Her name is on the back in small, precise letters - _Saoirse Joy Hrani_. Gaius says it to himself, over and over, practicing the way it feels on his tongue. Saoirse. It feels like when he used to say _darling._

He carries the postcard back to the lakeside. It will last as long as any other monument he could create - which is to say, not very long at all.

Gaius tucks the card into a fold of her sheet, and sits down beside her, resting his hand on hers beneath the silk. Perhaps she’s alive somewhere else - he rather hopes she is - but either way he’s glad to hold her, glad to have her here with him.

“Saoirse,” he whispers aloud, and lays down, his head on her shoulder.

 

*

 

She’s been watching him for hours, for years in fact, but it’s at this moment that she makes the decision.

It’s been difficult at times, knowing whether his ego or his insecurity or his love would win out. The future is where these two join: the human and cylon, yet even as she watched she wasn’t sure it could exist.

She would have held her breath, if she had breath, when Saoirse told Gaius what she was. She had, in fact, wrapped her arms around herself when she watched them fall beneath the rubble, as if she too could be injured in that moment.

Gaius is the one though, there’s no longer any question. He will have a role to play in the future.

“You don’t have to die, Gaius,” she whispers in Saoirse’s voice from just over his shoulder. “There’s still a chance.”

He flails wildly, unable yet to see her.

“Who are you? Who’s there?” he demands.

“There’s a shuttle coming,” she murmurs. “Take what you can carry and head south.”

“My darling--?” he asks, looking straight at where she’d be if she was.

She wants to answer him, which is odd. But she’s told him enough for now, and as she waits he leans over to press a last kiss to Saoirse’s forehead before he gets up and begins to move again, climbing back toward the house.

Now that he’s in motion, his self-protection will take over, she knows; he won’t need her again until the shuttle lands. In the meantime, she settles herself down where his body warmed the sand and savors the proof of his love.

 

 ***


End file.
